Structural units and the redintegrative power of picture fragments.

We suppose that line drawings are perceived and represented in memory as a hierarchy of related parts and subparts, as dictated by Gestalt laws like common direction and spatial proximity. Therefore, a figure fragment comprising a natural part of an orginally studied pattern should serve as a strong retrieval cue for redintegrating memory for the pattern, whereas an equally large fragment suggesting either no units of misleading units should lead to poorer recall. This was confirmed in an experiment in which subjects studied 33 nonsense line drawings; recall of each was tested with good, mediocre, or bad (misleading) fragments of the original patterns. Good cues had about five time more redintegrative power than bad cues. A second experiment testing multiple-choice recognition memory showed that subjects confused an originally studied pattern about four times as often with a structurally similar distractor as with a structurally dissimilar distractor (which had an equal-sized change). Thus, memory cuing by fragments and memory confusions with slightly altered distractors indicate the significant constitutents of a figure.